Open publishing is the same as free software

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is
transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it
instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those
stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find
the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made
by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial
decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help
shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is
free and change it and start their own site. If they want to
redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing
site.

The full rave

Open publishing is the same as free software.

They're both (r)evolutionary responses to the privatisation of
information by multinational monopolies. For software it's Microsoft.
For publishing it's CNN. For both software and publishing it's AOL
Time Warner.

Free software is a gift to humanity. If you have a piece of free software, you
can give it to someone else for free. You can charge for free software, but
once someone else has a copy, they can give away as many copies as they like.
So free software often comes at no charge. Let's call it free beer. But this
alone is not free software. Free software is also free as in free speech, not
just free beer.

It's about software freedom. A software liberation movement. The source code,
the genetic blueprint, the internal mechanics are open for others to see (hence
free software is also called open source). So others can take it and change it
and pass on their changes to other people. The product is freely available, and
the process of production is free and transparent.

If someone doesn't like it, they can take it and change it. The one thing they
can't change is its freedom. The only strings attached are there to stop people
from tying it down. The strings of freedom are called the GNU copyleft, a
beautiful subversion of copyright law that guarantees freedom for a piece of
code and all its mutations.

If you thought that, you'd be drastically underestimating what humans
get up to for fun. Because all of those adjectives apply to free
software. Geeks like to joke about what free software needs to do
next to achieve world domination.

Microsoft doesn't think this joke is very funny. Microsoft is one of
the biggest corporations in the world. Microsoft spends billions of
dollars to pay programmers to keep their software closed and
internals secret.

Free software is overwhelmingly written by volunteers. Free software
runs the internet and Microsoft does not. The number and diversity of
people using free software is accelerating.

Microsoft usually responds to such threats by buying them out and assimilating
them. But free software cannot be privatised. Free software is not frugal with
its genetic code. Free software spreads itself like a benevolent microbe after
an evolutionary leap forward.

Microsoft assumes people are stupid and holds focus groups to
determine exactly in what way are they stupid. They then pay a small
number of people a lot of money to engineer that stupidity into
software. Sometimes this works well, because everyone is stupid
sometimes. But it doesn't cater well for everyone being smart.

Free software assumes people are smart and creative and can choose
for themselves to swim in the shallow or the deep end of the
technology pool. Even the geekiest programmer might want to have
their feet planted on the bottom sometimes, and the freshest beginner
might make the biggest splash diving into the deep end.

Software is information. So are news stories. So are opinion pieces. They
can be easily copied and shared. Maybe information wants to be free?

Under the dominant multinational global news system, news is not
free, news is not open. It is very expensive. It is highly secretive.

To see the news you need to pay with money or with your time spent
watching ads (usually for cars) or both. To create the news you need
to pay expensive public relations consultants. To write the news you
need to obey corporate news values, making stories on a production
line, for maximum advertising impact at minimum cost. To edit the
news you need to be a global stock market newswire service or a
multinational media company. To distribute the news you need to have
one of 6 TV transmission towers in a city of millions.

Media corporations assume the viewers are stupid. In their eyes the
total creative potential of the audience is Funniest Home Videos.
Creative people do not buy more stuff, they make their own. This is a
problem for media multinationals. They do not trust their audience to
be creative. It might be bad for profits, bad for executive salaries.

But it's OK. The audience doesn't trust the corporate media either.

This situation has led to rampant confusion and alienation of
society. We are disconnected from ourselves and our ecology. Our
planet is functioning as a global ecosystem more than ever before due
to the global nature of human activity, yet the humans don't have any
way of communicating with each other. Systemic problems go unseen and
unsolved by billions. Only the issues that are important to sell ads
or grease the stock exchange have reliable global news impact.

What we have is a very complex system within which the humans have
recently gained enourmous power but as yet they have no
correspondingly powerful network of communication infrastructure to
support it. We have no neural network to process information. Not so
much a global village as a global megaphone.

Then the internet was added to the global communications pool. If you
can read the internet, you can also write to it. If someone else has
told a story on the internet, you can choose to hear it. Information
flows between the net and other communication systems: the phone, the
TV, the radio and newspapers, forming a much more balanced web of
information transfer. This is a global village where you can climb
out of the traffic jam and bump into people on the electronic street
and have a chat.

The internet makes possible open publishing on a citywide and global
scale. Citizens finally have access to the same cheap and powerful
two-way global communication that colonial governments and
multinationals have had access to for centuries.

What is open publishing?

Like free software, with open publishing the news is often distributed at no
charge. There are no ads to eat up your time and corrupt the content. But that
is not the most important thing.

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is
transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it
instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those
stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find
the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made
by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial
decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help
shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is
free and change it and start their own site. If they want to
redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing
site.

The working parts of journalism are exposed. Open publishing assumes the reader
is smart and creative and might want to be a writer and an editor and a
distributor and even a software programmer. Open publishing assumes that the
reader can tell a crappy story from a good one. That the reader can find what
they're after, and might help other readers looking for the same trail.

We trust the audience and it seems that the audience trusts us in
return.

Open publishing is playing at the opposite end of the trust spectrum
to the corporate media.

We are not working to convince people that this is a good way to do
things. We are providing a space in which people might decide
themselves if this is a good way to do things.

The journey is the destination.

Open publishing is not new. It is an electronic reinvention of the
ancient art of story telling.

Open publishing is free software. It's freedom of information,
freedom for creativity.

Open publishing is overwhelmingly done by volunteers.

Who will do the investigative journalism? How will people give a
perspective from overseas? What will provide a sense of overview,
connectedness and common identity? Will anyone get paid for their
work? What will become of motion pictures? Of musicians? Where will
be the sustained efforts by hundreds of people?

I am hoping the above questions about open publishing have already
been answered by free software. And partly by indymedia, and
thousands of other open publishing websites. Open publishing is
merely taking an existing trend and identifying it, amplifying it,
and strategically applying it to weak points in the global monopolies
on power and information.

The pyramids are awe inspiring. They were also built by slave labour.
We've evolved as a species. We can do a lot of amazing things without
brutal Egyptian slave handling techniques. We can do without new
pyramids.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction of species. We need to
figure out how to live in harmony with the ecosystem of this planet
before the ecosystem goes into negative feedback and kills lifeforms
by the billions. We're not going to get there by sacrificing our
lives for the motor car, trading our human rights for shoes, killing
our people for drug companies, hiding our creativity for the
multionationals.

We can do better. Forget the pyramids. Bypass world domination.

Free software is wiring the globe. Open publishing just might help
us use those wires to save the planet.

footnotes

None of the above meet all the criteria above for open
publishing. But they're pretty close. There'd be heaps
more out there. Suggestions welcome.

Note that while slashdot.org has many open
publishing features, and was an important inspiration for
open publishing, I don't think it really is open publishing.
Significantly, the stories (as opposed to the comments) are
taken from reader contributions, but are processed behind
closed doors.

By the way, none of the above four sites would exist without free software. I
guess it's one more reason why open publishing is free software.

................

Obviously I think we can learn a lot from the free software movement. One idea
we haven't developed much yet is an open publishing copyleft, similar to the
free software copyleft.
The copyleft defines how the information can be shared, hijacking the copyright
laws to ensure that the free information may only be re-used in a free context.
This encourages growth of free spaces, autonomous zones, as the process of
sharing information is spread along with the information itself. This may be a
key part of what we need to define open publishing to ourselves and potential
collaborators. It doesn't have to be legally watertight to be useful. That can
be evolved in later, The most useful thing would be to start playing with the
definition. This is partly what we are doing with our work on defining the
indymedia network. But I think we will also need to define how we share chunks
of information smaller than that involved in total membership of the network.
And the basic chunk of information is a story and the copyleft license that
applies to it.

The most interesting idea to me so far in this area applied to news
stories is the idea that a story can be reused anywhere, but only if
all readers/viewers exposed to it, can easily identify and reach the
source of the news story. For example by a subtitle on the picture
with the web address of the indymedia site the story came from. This
means the viewer can not only verify the original version of the
story, but also add their own creative juices to the flow. This would
help ensure that whereever the story goes, there is a solid link back
to the working parts, the raw process that made it possible and
allows new people to contribute and mutate and evolve.

This does involve giving up the right to demand payment for every
copy made. Free software sacrifices the same thing and it turns out
there that it really works. We need to try it for news stories and
documentaries, and see if it works equally well.

One key point is that yu can still charge for copies of copyleft
information. You just can't stop someone else from giving away the
copy they bought, including access to the source materials. And the
source materials have to be available for no more than the raw cost
of distribution.

And it turns out that people still do buy free software. An awful lot
of it in fact.

And that in addition, the reputation of free software spreads very
quickly if it is good. Which benefits the software project by
providing more feedback, more volunteers to help improve it, and in
some cases more money.

The analogy for a video documentary would be placing it under
copyleft so that anyone could copy it as long as the copy prominently
said it was copyleft and any viewer could find a link back to the
source (e.g. the indymedia web address for the city it came from).
But the video maker could still charge for copies to be made. They
could charge especially high rates for multinational TV networks that
want copies urgently for example. The TV network would have to pay if
they wanted the footage quickly without chasing down someone else who
had it and was willing to copy it fast. And regardless of how badly
they edited the piece, because of the copyleft license, they would
legally have to give over some of the attention of their viewers to a
web address for the source. That viewer attention is an extremely
valuable resource for the network, because it is extremely powerful.
It can also be powerful for us. If they fail to give the web address,
they can be sued for the value of that viewer attention. That's quite
a liability.

There are ways to play the system. I'm not sure if this would work,
but it might be fun and I think it's worth a try!

Ideals and reality: many of the things I say above are ideals. They
do not match reality exactly. But they are useful as a way of
thinking about different approaches.

For example free software and open publishing are not actually free
of charge, but the charge is reduced to the bare cost of
distribution. This is hundreds of times less than the previous cost
of purchase, which tended to include the cost of luxury cars, houses
and jets for multinational executives. There is a real difference.

Another important point with free software is that programming is a
skill in very high demand, which gives programmers an unusual amount
of power as a group of people at this point in history. Historically
I think this has lead to great social change. A flaw in this rant
might be that programmers may become far less in demand and that
story tellers and journalists are already in oversupply in economic
thinking.

However, once we turn down various patterns of overconsumption, we
can create a virtuous circle that gives us more leisure time, greater
quality of life for both us and people living in other countries
poorer (financially) than ours (I live in a rich country, this is
written for a rich country audience). For example, getting rid of a
car creates a huge amount of leisure time because you no longer need
to spend all that time earning enough money to sit in traffic jams.
Again, this is simplistic, there are urban planning issues to
consider, but I believe a lot of it is cultural and information
exchange is part of changing our culture to be more responsive to our
own needs as well as the planet's.

In other words, with any luck and lots of hard work and fun, things
might just start falling into place in time to grow and evolve as a
species and a global ecosystem.

...

It seems many parts of society are being privatised. Health, water,
communications, community media. Being owned by the government or a non-profit
is no guarantee. Sometimes there are some benefits from privatisation. But I'm
not convinced it's the only way to get such benefits, and there are heavy
costs. Particularly in poorer countries, where prices for basics (such as water
in Bolivia) can become suddenly way out of reach.

Free software can't be privatised.

Especially copyleft free software.

Corporations can use it, improve it, but they can't get an exclusive hold of
it, they can't deny others from using it and changing it.

Can open publishing be privatised? I think the right definition will be strong
protection against privatisation. But the large effects of the subtle
difference in licensing between copyleft and BSD shows how important the
definition can be. Let's play with a few and see which ones work best.

...

All the fuss about sharing music and dotbombs in the mainstream media is
hiding an important trend: the most successful internet sites rely on
the creativity of their users, not on professional producers as
was the tradition with earlier electronic media.

geocities.com is a universe of web pages which anyone can add to,
and last i heard it's a top-ten website (imagine a TV channel where viewers
could contribute whatever they liked, and it having shows in the top-ten:
it sounds unlikely, and this is an example of why the net is so different to TV)

amazon.com relies heavily on readers for book reviews (and they've bought
imdb.com, which is a massive compilation of user data on movies)

egroups.com is about people getting together in groups and yakking
about whatever they're passionate about

ebay.com is about people selling stuff to each other: a bazaar, not a
mall full of franchises

These are all sites with very big audiences, and they all facilitate
creativity, rather than have their staff create it directly.
Of course, when anyone can contribute,
you have a problem where users need to figure out
what things they can trust.
Most of these sites are successful because they've figured out
some neat ways of helping that to happen, often using some sort of
user-ratings system (user-editorial).
So these sites all have some of the spirit of open publishing.

On the old one-way systems, community media was the exception. On the net,
community media is very much a part of the mainstream.

Yes, there have been stories showing that AOL users spend most of their time
just using AOL services, implying that people are happy to stay in AOL
corporate land. However, those stories did not reveal what those users
were doing. I reckon they'd be doing email, instant messaging, and
just a little browsing. Since they use AOL tools to do email and messaging
that counts as AOL time, so in fact a better indication of the diversity of
their surfing would be found by looking just at the time spent browsing.
The rest of the time they're spending communicating with other users.
Every time in the past that a closed network has been tried, it's failed
when faced with the internet (the biggest example was compuserve).
So AOL may be closer than anyone else to creating a shopping mall version of
the net, but they're still a lot further away than they'd like you to believe.

People want to communicate, they want to be creative. TV is a technology
that can't handle such things very well, yet we've managed to convince
ourselves after decades of TV that we need professionals to do our
story telling.

Imagine if you tried to sell phones but they could only dial
Pizza Hut or send messages written by Hallmark? Nobody would buy
them (it's been tried: a very early marketing idea for the
telephone had people using it to listen to opera). People are social
animals, we want to use
our communication tools to talk to other people. The only reason this
didn't happen with TV, is because TV technology is one-way only.

So just because TV didn't live up to idealistic expectations, doesn't mean
that the net has to follow the same path.
The net is a fully two-way technology, and
that makes a very big difference. The reason you mightn't hear about this
trend is because a lot of the internet commentary we see is still
coming from the old one-way media.

Indymedia is struggling to cross a threshold in the size of its audience and in
the sheer number of indymedia collectives. Many indymedia groups are also
grappling with what to do when they are not covering a major event.

As the size of the audience goes up, so does the number of people posting
stories, and therefore the number of stories that are more annoying than
useful to most readers. A classic example is the rising tide of american
postings on sydney indymedia. The posters don't seem to realise that we
are quite capable of clicking on an american indymedia site if we wish to
hear american news.

Open publishing I think has been very important in helping us to find new ways
of organising media, often taking advantage of what the internet makes
possible. A crucial part of Seattle Indymedia's success in Nov 99 was the
automated online open-publishing newswire. I think what indymedia needs to get
to the next level is automated open-editing.

Just as open publishing allows any readers to also write stories, open
editing allows any reader to help sub-edit other people's stories. They
might help sort stories by whatever criteria they think are important, or
rewrite story summaries, translate to different languages, or compile
groups of stories into a feature. Changes would be tracked so that
original authors do not get trampled on. Much of this is already
happening, but automation would turbo-charge it.

Done well, it will clear a lot of bottlenecks and allow a lot of exta
creativity to plug into the network. It will make the sites more
approachable for new readers, and more useful for activist media hacks. I
think it could have a similar impact to open publishing. All we need is
some geeks to implement it.

It's a bit like web search engines. Altavista was much
better than all the rest back in the late 90's, but then the
web got too big, Altavista's approach became ineffective,
and google stepped in with an enhanced method for making
sense of the net without imposing entralised order or missing
things out. Interestingly, google introduced the idea of
weighting search results by the number of pages that
link to each other. Which is a bit like the user highlights
stuff that some of us have been talking about for indymedia.

Google deals usefully with the explosion of information and
diversity on the web in a way that heirachical and even
simple raw search methods do not. Expect a similar leap in
the impact of indymedia if and when open editing starts to kick in.

Hopefully at the bottom of a news story in the near future you'll see tools like
these:

Open publishing tools:

contribute a story

add a comment

Open editing tools:

highlight this story (add this story to your highlights page, which in turn
allows you to email newsblasts of your highlights, and to collect stories into
a feature for consideration for the front page)

choose a topic area for this story (is this story about poverty? human
rights? forests? then help us make sense of the flow and pick some keywords.
also, what lifespan does this story have? short-term, long term? is it a local
story or an international one? does it include local perspective?)

check the facts (add sources for facts cited in this story)

major revision (make it clearer, tighten the writing, add new points;
revisions appear in the sidebar; the contributor or their delegate must approve
before it becomes the version displayed by default)

translate (into another language, into another culture e.g. from english to
spanish, or from academic jargon to straight journo style)

verify this story (I'm not sure what this really means, maybe if a story
has collected enough highlights to be considered for the front page, or
keywords have been proposed, or a revision or translation has been proposed and
an author has delegated the audience to subedit; then random people will be
asked to verify if a proposed action is a good idea; a formula based on
audience size and creativity determines the threshhold for action)

list other stories needing verification (if the user has been given random
votes I guess)

flag this story as wildly inappropriate (strict conditions: a verbatim
duplicate, summary does not match story, story contains a software virus, spam,
or shocking images with no political context - the flagger must provide a short
(and optionally additional longer) comment as to why; low karma users can only
flag limited numbers of stories, e.g. one per week)

ignore this story, show me another one (if the story is boring, then just
move on to the next thing, no need to take explicit action)

Sidebar:

Story status: is it a fresh contribution? is it in the bin? number of
comments, highlighted N times, is it proposed for the front page? Link to full
log of editorial actions for this story.

Highlighters: link to people's highlights pages which have picked this
sstory

Keywords: list keywords and list recent stories with the same keywords

Revisions: list proposed revisions and older versions

Translations

Fact checking: list sources for information and statistics in this article

Comments: show a selection of comments attached to this story; show total
number of comments; give tools for diving into discussion (e.g. top rated
comments? recent comments?)

Now the tricky part is how to balance the creativity of the audience with the
very small percentage of people who want to disrupt a creative space.

There may be different stages to go through. This is because of the ratios of
audience participation (see below) change as the audience size increases. A
smaller audience might have a more cosy feel, and therefore a higher percentage
of creative contributors. A larger audience will tend to cross a threshhold
where disruptive people are numerous enough to have a major effect.

There is also the difference between live coverage of a major event, as against
ongoing coverage of a place or an issue.

So the default needs to be that people can contribute material that other
audience members get to see straight away.

Then take away a small number of posts that are dangerous to the site as a
whole. For example spam or viruses or items that attract lawsuits. Individual
collectives will have to figure out where to draw the line.

For the rest, it's a matter of priority. For a busy site, a new article would
need to go through various checks to get onto the front page. A key tension
pops up during live coverage of an event, between the need to check stories and
the desire to see news come through quickly. But presumably if there is a big
audience for a live event (indymedia's audience usually explodes during such
times) and therefore more people to help with open editing, and thus ways for
important news to get to the front page more quickly. News junkines will drill
down to the latest news, and we need exactly those people to help highlight
stuff for wider viewing.

The main thing is that the checks on a story's priority can't involve too many
built-in delays (e.g. waiting seven days for votes to come in from a fixed
collective) if you want a flexible system. Ideally any ratios used are tied to
some sort of rough average of the current audience and the number of stories
and contributors.

Another thing to consider is that some stories have a short lifetime, maybe
hours or days, and others - considered opinion pieces, deailed issue coverage -
might be relevant for much longer.

But what checks do we need? Can we build some sort of rough framework that can
stretch to fit these various scenarios?

Let's start by trusting most readers to be able to judge when a story is
important and interesting enough to recommend other people look at it. That's
when they might choose to highlight it on their personal highlights page. The
cool thing about this is there's no need to verify that action, because that
page is owned by that user, and any people they choose to share write access
with.

Some readers might only highlight stories that many people think are useless.
Well, that's still useful in a way, and it doesn't really harm anything at that
point.

The next stage is how to use those highlighting choices (or other editorial
choices like revisions and translations) to change the priority of a story.

This is where you need to try and weed out abuse of the system. Any such weeding
of course needs to be documented in an open way (use free software, show logs of
changes to an article's status, list the editorial actions a user has taken,
require comments for such actions, and finally allow anyone to rummage through
the bin).

A helpful characteristic of abuse is that (almost by definition) it seems to be
remain a very small percentage of the audience. So a major tactic is to try and
encourage as large a section of the audience as possible to get involved in
open publishing and open editing, and for the collective running a site to set
a good example using those tools. A healthy plant is less likely to be attacked
by parasites.

Another tactic it to require independent and random confirmation. You should
not be able to bump up the pirority of a story if you contributed it. You
should not be able to (easily) organise a small group of people to bump up each
other's stories. Tactics for doing this include handing out votes to random
users, and limiting the number of votes (based on some formula tied to the
audience and contributor numbers for that day or week).

Another tactic is the idea of karma. People who contribute to the site can
build up a reputation within the software, so that they are trusted a bit more,
or a bit less. You don't want to go too far with this or it encourages a clique
and starts to leach diversity.

...

formulas for open publishing audience sizes and participation

1%, say, of your audience at an open publishing site will contribute
stories

0.2% will help with open editing, including weeding out spam

0.1% will contribute stories with closed publishing

0.1% will contribute spam with open publishing

0.01% will help with closed editing

the figures are guessed, but they give an idea of the ratios, and are roughly
based on my experience, e.g. with large mailing lists, and the statistics for
www.indymedia.org in early 2002.

open publishing/editing also implies for me that it's encouraged and easy to
use and well designed.

so if you only have 10 people in your audience, open editing isn't useful,
and on average only 1 person is contributing stories.

if you have 1000 people in your audience (which actualyl translates to a
lot of hits) then you have 100 people contributing stories, which is
starting to get interesting.

if, say, it turns out you need 100 people doing open editing for it to be
useful (no good if only one person is making ratings) then u need an
audience of 10,000.

if anything, these percentages are actually a bit high. they probably decay a
bit as the audience gets bigger. closed systems will tend to hit a hard limit,
beyond which communication amongst the team becomes very tough, or increasingly
heirachical, especially if the team is working long distance. lots of other
factors of course too. and of course "open" and "closed"
are pretty vague, in fact there's a full range between them, so a more open
system will tend to push the numbers up, and a more closed one will push them
down.

...

April 2002

The New York Times
says communication is making the world less tolerant. But
while they mention the internet at the beginning of the
story, most of the piece is actually about global
television. If anything, this makes the case for open
publishing stronger. It's not just whether communications
are global, but how they are global.

Conflict is a basic element of good drama. If everyone in a
story just gets along, it's a boring story. This is an issue
that indymedia must deal with. So far the most popular
indymedia coverage is of big conflicts with authorities during large
protests. If we want to get away from that, we need to find
a way to present the interesting conflict in a story that
still presents positive possibilities rather than being all
negative. Conflict and creativity. Co-operation and
competition. We need to find a good balance between these
extremes.

...

September 2002

Content is not
king. I've been saying this for years, but nowhere near as elloquently as
Andrew Odlyzko does.

What does this mean for open publishing? Why bother making the process of
creating content open if the end product doesn't matter that much?

Because what does matter is communication, social interaction. And open
publishing means the process of creating content is opened up for people to
engage in. Automated software and the web make this accessible and possible for
much greater numbers of people than ever before, despite the best, noble and
admirable efforts of community media.

And that process of writing news, publishing it, commenting on it, editing it,
that engagement of people in the fundamental task of telling a good story, of
sifting through which stories are important, and having a good old chinwag when
the storyteller finishes. That process, may turn out to be more important than
the story itself. That process is what may open up new opinions, new
opportunities, new action for social justice. That the process is open, that
more people get in and help do it. That is what would strengthen the fabric of
our society, to enable us to repair the wrongs and improve all our lives.

One thing I've been saying for a while is that the net is a communications
crutch. Our cities have cut us apart and made it hard for people to come
together and communicate. Shared space is all given over to cars and commerce.
People don't feel safe meeting other people in public.

So the net is like a crutch, we are leaning on it heavily as we communicate and
find each other, helping us to meet people with common ground, and figure out
who we humans really are. But there's nothing like meeting in the flesh. So one
day with any luck the crutch will fade away to a minor role, when we fix our
cities and our lives, and find society in the street and buildings and open
spaces of our lives.

...

indymedia, internet and the global middle class
December 2002
indymedia's third
birthday

most of the people I have met through indymedia are white, middle class, from
an english speaking background. people like myself.

most, but not all.

a lot of indymedia depends on the internet, and i think the internet is a
middle class tool. that still makes a potential audience of hundreds of
millions of people around the planet.

and i think many of those people are ignored in the mainstream media, dominated
as it is by just 6 corporations. many of those middle class people are ignored
in elections, where the president of the USA is voted in by just 1% of the
planet's population.

i think when you criticise indymedia and the net, it's important to remember
what we had before.

which is better? the corporate media, or indymedia? television or the net?

there are obvious limits to what can be done with a mostly middle class
audience. by sheer numbers alone, it cannot be the sole basis for planetwide
democracy.

the USA, for all its faults, did a lot of good things by empowering its middle
class, rather than leaving all the power with the royal family.

throughout US history, people have been saying that more should have been done
to respect all the people's rights. there is a very tragic history of what
happened instead, what is still happening. but atleast, atleast they did as
much as they did. after all, some people's battles were won. to say otherwise
is to write off all the achievements, diversity, and people of the USA. i think
we can acknowledge what's good, without ignoring the bad.

nowadays, with power gone global, i feel creating more power among a billion
people has got to be better than leaving it in a handful of mega corps.

in fact i think one reason the US government has gotten so crazy over the last
hundred years is because power went global, but democracy did not. which means
even within the USA, and within other "western democracies", national democracy
is meaningless and feels obsolete.

how can we do even better?

i think part of it is teaching people who have resources about the people who
have not. and another part is sharing those resources.

many indymedia collectives are consciously working on this. they setup media
centres and train people how to use them. they print out stories and distribute
free papers. they collaborate with radio stations. there are links to
resistance groups in poor countries, collaborations between north and south.

these sorts of things must be done before indymedia can really call itself a
people's media. this truly democratic media would be a crucial part of
achieving real democracy and human rights for all 6 billion people on the
planet.

meanwhile, you can write off the global middle class if you like.

i am more optimistic.

...

the more i think about what the US and other middle class democracies have done
to the poor people of their countries and of the world, the more i worry about
global media democracy.

even middle class democracy these days can be a bit of a sham, but that doesn't
make it any better to leave out the poor of the planet.

i still think indymedia has got to be a step in the right direction, but it
still leaves so far to go.

but being conscious of this dilemma and caring about it is an important step to
finding solutions and fixing it. let's atleast not pretend that indymedia is for
"everyone" just yet. but make sure we acknowledge what we have done, and keep
working to expand the circle of diversities of all kinds.

...

June 2003

Lots happening in blogspace.

Emergent
democracy talks about how to bootstrap our global decision making to a level
that can cope with global complexity. And has some details and speculations on
how a blog-like communication structure may help to do that.

Key author of that piece, Joi Ito, later blogged that journalism
has to change as well as it is part of democracy. That's why I'm linking it in
here.

...

Many ideas in here are shamelessly ripped off from other places. I really
should credit those places and people. Or, if you like an idea in
here, please assume I ripped it off, and do a web search and find it
(actually you might have to wait a few years for search engines that
can actually find ideas as opposed to phrases).

You can copy and distribute this article, as long as you include the web
address of the original (http://www.purplebark.net/maffew/cat/openpub.html) in a
way that the whole audience can see. Please let me know if you do reproduce it
somewhere, especially if you make changes to it.